“The Chief Task is to Assess the Protestant Adjustment of Traditional Scholastic Categories in the Light of The Reformation”

A Clearer Understanding of the Meaning of the Reformation Itself This entry concludes the section of Richard Muller’s work under the heading, “Doctrine and Method in the Era of Early Orthodoxy (ca. 1565-1618-1640)”. What’s been most notable for me, in publishing selections from Muller, is to notice the continuities of thought through the Reformation period. …

Doctrine of God: Context in Doctrine and Piety

Muller is concerned to set “Reformed Orthodox” thinking of the late 16th and 17th century writers in their proper context: they were both “churchly” – concerned about how their writings emerged from and fit into the life of the churches. “Theology proper” most notably the Doctrine of God, arose precisely as a way to help …

How Reformed Scholasticism differed from Medieval Scholasticism

For the Orthodox Reformed writers working in the generations after the Reformation, “scholasticism” was a method of doing things, not an appropriation of earlier doctrines. These writers and theologians worked with the “broad brush” provided by the Reformers, as they sought to “establish … systematically the normative, catholic character of institutionalized Protestantism.” The term scholasticism …

Reformed “Orthodoxy”: Toward Definition

Richard Muller describes a two-phased process: first, the early reformers sought to correct “a host of abuses and nonscriptural doctrinal accretions” that they tried to correct. And second, the later writers, and indeed the process of “confessionalization” (the writing of and attempts to organize their lives by confessions), sought to “provide definitions of all doctrines …

More Definitions of Terms

As I continue to work through Richard Muller’s “Post-Reformation Reformed Dogmatics”, I’ll likely be stumbling across a lot of names and concepts that simply aren’t familiar to 21st century believers. So it’s good that Muller helpfully explains a lot of these terms. A comment is also necessary here concerning the terms used throughout the study. …

A. G. Dickens on Luther’s Success

A.G. Dickens was Professor of History at the University of London; he wrote several works that I have, including “The English Reformation,” The Counter-Reformation,” and “The Reformation in Historical Thought.” I’m pretty fascinated by all of these, and hope to quote from them in the coming weeks and months. According to the A.G. Dickens Wiki, …